EPISODE 68 OF THE MARKETING SOLUTIONS PODCAST: SELF-CONFIDENCE VS SELF-ESTEEM IN BUSINESS AND HOW TO REINVENT YOURSELF

Sonya:
Have you ever been knocked down in business? As our podcast guest, Brooke McCarthy said during this episode, if you haven't been, then you haven't been in business long enough.

Sonya:
We've all been at a point where we feel it would be just so much easier to go and stack the shelves at Woolies. When she said this, I completely agree with her. But at the end of the day, if you can make business work, it is so worth it.

Sonya:
This conversation was incredibly varied. We spoke about everything from self confidence versus self-esteem in business, the lessons Brooke has learned in the last 13 years as being self employed, and how to reinvent yourself. Enjoy.

Sonya:
Welcome to the Boom Your Biz podcast, a podcast for the movers, the shakers, and even bigger action takers in business. I'm your host, Sonya McIntyre-Reid and each week I'll be exploring the question of what really makes businesses and organizations thrive. I'm on a mission to educate, empower, and inspire business owners and myself along the way.

Sonya:
Today I am joined by Brooke McCarthy. Brooke, thank you so much for coming on the show. You're actually a marketer yourself.

Brooke McCarthy:
I am indeed. Please don't hold that against me. Nobody's [inaudible 00:01:25] like marketing except for marketers.

Sonya:
So true. So true. It's like that [inaudible 00:01:32] golden book, I think it's called All Marketers Are Liars. I was, oh, that's mean. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do, Brooke?

Brooke McCarthy:
Sure. So I am a digital marketing trainer as well as a business coach. I've been self-employed for 13 years now and I work mainly with other self-employed people. So small business owners from bricks-and-mortar businesses to online businesses, mainly in the services rather than selling products and mainly in the health and creative sectors.

Sonya:
Oh fantastic, 13 years in business. You must have learnt a lot of lessons over that time care to share a few with us?

Brooke McCarthy:
Oh, I think what you meant to say is I must have made a few mistakes because I made all the mistakes several times over, which is what makes me qualified as a business coach. Look so many things I have pivoted a couple of times it's been a slow migration from one thing to another, and I think that it can be done well when you can take your clients with you.

Brooke McCarthy:
So, you can move from one industry or sector to another. So for the first seven years, I specialized in yoga and alternative health and when I decided after seven years that I was done, that I was finished with that I think I quite successfully took my community with me.

Brooke McCarthy:
So I still do have several yoga teachers and alternative health practitioners. But now I have a lot wider variety of service professionals as well.

Sonya:
Is there any moments you can recall over the last 13 years where you would just that see it done, something disastrous had happened or just something completely out of the blue in your business?

Sonya:
Everyone talks about all these amazing, shiny moments. We all have that Instagram view put forward and I just think that business is not like that it's really, really hard. So I think we should be talking about the real moments that happen as well.

Brooke McCarthy:
Yes, more of this. Absolutely and I 100% agree with you and I think that it doesn't get spoken about nearly enough because it's really, really normal. And if you haven't had that feeling of, oh my God, I'm just going to go and stack shelves in Woolworths. Stacking shelves looks like a very attractive job right now. Then you probably haven't been self-employed for long enough because sooner or later that moment will come and then it'll probably come again and come again and come again.

Brooke McCarthy:
Definitely a low point for me was following the birth of my second baby, because that's really where the wheels fell off and after I had the first baby I felt invincible, I felt like Wonder Woman. I'm look at me, I've got a baby at the breast and the other hands on the laptop and I'm just winning at life and kicking goals.

Brooke McCarthy:
And then the great undoing of course was the second child who doesn't sleep and my partner, I should also say is self-employed, so the two of us working from home, both self-employed, it was just all chaos all the time with the toddler and the baby, there's 21 months between them. So probably for about 18 months, I was really not in a good place and I kept working, I didn't quit, I didn't do anything drastic but I was not firing on all cylinders. My mood was far from robust and I was doing what I thought was a pretty good job of faking it. But in retrospect, it's only after you get out the other end and you go, my God, with the benefit of hindsight, that was really not good and I made a lot of changes up to that time.

Brooke McCarthy:
I got to a point where I thought this is not good and I started changing up what I was doing and yeah I haven't looked back and of course there's ebbs and flows. I think oftentimes we underestimate the role of our emotions in business and underestimate the role of a good night's sleep.

Sonya:
Yeah, I hear you there.

Brooke McCarthy:
Yeah. So, I think sometimes we're way too hard on ourselves. We think we need to be clear, we need to be motivated and we need to be focused all the time and we're human. So I think we need to cut ourselves some slack.

Sonya:
Oh, absolutely and I know for me, something I've struggled with in the past is beating myself up because I think everyone else around me has their shit together. They know what they're doing, they're confident, their business is fantastic all of the time and I used to think, oh my gosh, do other people not have the same issues pop up in business that I do? And then I realized, no, everyone goes through that. Absolutely everyone, if you've been in business long enough and it's not a sign that you're failing at all. In fact, I would say you're probably learning and growing from it.

Brooke McCarthy:
Absolutely and we tend to think that all of our flaws are on display. It all feels incredibly public and I hear this sentiment repeated by a lot of my clients that it feels they're walking naked down the main street and everybody's watching and waiting for them to trip up and make a mistake and everybody can see every small error that they make and the reality is it's probably not nearly as visible as you think you are and probably most people are too busy thinking about themselves and worrying about themselves and worrying about how they appear to be paying too much attention to any small missteps you make.

Sonya:
Oh, absolutely. I talk about this all the time, the spotlight effect, where you think that you've got a spotlight on you and everyone's watching, but you're right. Everyone's too worried about what other people are thinking of them to be worried about you. [inaudible 00:07:53] So with the struggles of business, there can be self doubt and self sabotage that do come into play from time to time, whether or not we realize it. What would you recommend to someone that is finding themselves in a position where that is affecting their lives and their business at this point in time?

Brooke McCarthy:
Oh, look I think self-doubts very, very normal. Like I was saying before you may have a bad night's sleep and that can have an impact on your confidence and your self-doubt. I think when it tips into self sabotage, it can often be really tricky to see it as such and it often requires an outside perspective or a hell of a lot of wisdom to really see that and recognize it as self-sabotage.

Brooke McCarthy:
So a small example, I used to run courses into state I still do but when I first started running courses into state, I used to go to Melbourne and I'd go out and I would get righteously drunk. Every single time I would hang out and I'd get really and I'd tell myself, oh, I'm just a good time girl. I just like having a good time. It's fun being away from the kids. I like meeting people. I love Melbourne, blah, blah, blah.

Brooke McCarthy:
And it took me many years before I recognize this as self-sabotage and go, you know what, probably the reason that you go out the night before you're running a course is anxiety and feeling you're not good enough and feeling there's going to be a room full of people who paid to see you and who are you to be that person to turn up and tell them anything useful.

Sonya:
So how do you change your behavior from that then, is it just the process of recognizing it?

Brooke McCarthy:
Yeah, I think the process of recognizing it but I was saying, I think it's really useful to have an objective perspective to have an outsider's perspective and to look at what is the end goal of these beliefs? What is the end goal of these values?

Brooke McCarthy:
Because oftentimes ... here's another one Sonya, which is a little bit obscure. For years I never had payment plans because I thought, well, if somebody can't afford to pay in full upfront for my services, then I don't want to take their money. They don't have enough money and I don't want to take it, they're not my client. And I felt really proud of this, I felt this was a virtue, this was a good thing, look at me I'm so virtuous and upon further examination and having spoken to a wider variety of people, I realized actually that belief was completely misinformed and that actually for most people, they may well be able to afford it, but they don't have a lazy grand or three sitting in the bank account.

Brooke McCarthy:
They can afford the services and they want the services and their best place to get the most out of the services. But cashflow is an issue and a payment plan would be actually far more equitable and far more democratic.

Sonya:
Isn't that an interesting one, whereas you had your mind solidly made up to begin with about it. I think a lot of this with the self-sabotage can come down to self-confidence and I mean, it's something for myself is you might have a day where a couple of little things happen and they rock your confidence a bit and you retreat back into your shell, you stop putting yourself out there and it can be hard to, I think, break out of that cycle. Once you've had those couple of knocks happen. What can we be doing to build our self-confidence more in business?

Brooke McCarthy:
That's an excellent question and I think anyone who's been in business for a minute and-a-half will appreciate the role that self-confidence plays. So I see self-confidence as the way that you act in the world. So the external way that you act in the world and self-esteem as the internal way that you relate to yourself and how you value yourself, how you feel about yourself.

Brooke McCarthy:
So I think the joyful thing about self-confidence is that it's a lot more simple and straightforward than self-esteem. So you could have, for example, there'd be lots of people in the public arena who big public personalities, who appear to have excellent self confidence but probably their psychologist or psychiatrist would know they have pretty dismal self-esteem. So the joyful thing of self confidence is that you can actually act confidently and trust that the feeling of confidence will follow the action.

Brooke McCarthy:
And if you take the approach of action first, feeling second then it's a really productive way of working because you push yourself to do the things that scare you. You push yourself to turn out, to make the sales call, to pitch yourself, to get on stage. Every time I speak on stage, I'm a quivering mess, I'm in the wings of the stage, I'm shaking, I'm all clammy and hot I'm sure I'm not to throw up and within five minutes and if at that point, I said I'm not feeling confident I quit, I can't do this, I just don't feel confident, I feel terrible. Then I wouldn't go on stage, but I know that if I can just push through this first five minutes, then after five minutes on stage, you'll have to drag me off you won't shut me up and I'll be having a blast.

Brooke McCarthy:
And if you practice self-confidence and treat it like an action first, then the joyful part of it is you're [cruing 00:13:47] experience. Because there's no way that I would have done half the things I'd done if I'd waited until I felt ready. I didn't feel ready I felt completely out of my depth, I felt I didn't have enough.

Brooke McCarthy:
Even starting my business, I thought I'm way too young to start a business, what am I doing? I need more experience. I don't know what I'm doing and if I had done that I wouldn't have experience and therefore you wouldn't have the results of that.

Sonya:
Absolutely and I mean, even that just sounds like me having a conversation with myself to get out of bed, go for a swim in the morning. Once you're there, you don't want to get out it's fantastic. But I think you're right, running it through your head maybe it comes down to living in your head too much instead of just taking that action. And I think that's for so many things in our life that procrastination, and instead of just, I guess Nike you say is so good, Just Do It.

Brooke McCarthy:
Oh yeah. What a great tagline [inaudible 00:14:48] from one [inaudible 00:14:49] to another, what an awesome tagline I mean really so good.

Sonya:
You think that's why you have been so successful at reinventing yourself over the last 13 years and how have you managed to do that? What does that look like?

Brooke McCarthy:
Look, it's certainly not easy to reinvent yourself because of all the internal shifts that need to go on. So the practical things are things like I need to change my business name, I need to get a new website domain, I need to redo my website, I need to create packages or new service offerings to talk about this new thing that I'm doing and I need to say no to that work that I have been doing and reposition myself towards my new direction. That stuff is fairly straightforward.

Brooke McCarthy:
It's not easy, but it's fairly straightforward. The difficult part I think, is having that self-belief and having that new identity and that takes time and it is a process I think of grieving because you're grieving for the old beliefs and the old attitude and the old identity that you used to have.

Brooke McCarthy:
And there's a feeling of perhaps remorse there of, gee whiz, if only I'd acted this way earlier, my life could be different right now. If only I'd chosen a different life partner, for example, I might be in a different scenario and this is no comment on my partner. He's awesome, no regrets, but I think that internal process of reinventing yourself is significant because if you don't go through that process of dismantling your identity and rebuilding yourself from the inside out, then it's really difficult for you to keep making moves in your new direction.

Brooke McCarthy:
You do revert to type, you do start marketing in a defensive way rather than a proactive way and you do risk wasting your efforts and energy because your belief is not behind your marketing. And I think at the very least, I hope you agree with me, Sonya, the starting point for effective marketing is you need to believe it, you as the business owner need to believe what you're saying, that has to be surely [inaudible 00:17:20] .

Sonya:
Oh, absolutely and I mean we and myself, I've just gone through, I guess, a re-invention over the last six months where I've broken away from the original brand I've built up to build up another agency and it's completely different target market and pricing and messaging and the first few months I was stuck in this identity of thinking I was still working with startups and working with people that don't necessarily, I guess, have the cash flow or just starting out.

Sonya:
Whereas now we're working with established brands and that was really, really hard to break free from. But once I started believing in my team and the work that we're doing and the results that we're generating, its just exploded and I don't know it's funny. I'm not super into the worst side of things, but it feels once I believed in myself and the brand and what we're offering, everything just fell into line and I feel so much more confident talking about what it is we do and putting it out there now, whereas I'd sort of danced around it for the first few months and I wasn't confident. So I would completely agree with that statement. Yes.

Brooke McCarthy:
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean can we talk about the role of faith in marketing and in business in general? Because there is ... marketing is not like graphic design, for example, it's not like copywriting, you can't point to it and say, we expect an immediate guaranteed outcome to this. I see a lot of business owners where they publish a blog post or they commission a video for their home page or they get a new website and they expect, right it's all going to come raining down on my head now, all the cash and the clients are going to be knocking on my door.

Brooke McCarthy:
They expect this immediate outcome to the marketing activities and it doesn't work like that and there is a element of faith and an element of trust involved and every time I launch something new, every time I raised my prices, every time I publish a sales page you crush your fingers and you think, well, I think it'll work, I've done my research. I've asked some clients, I've done the groundwork, but there's an element of crossing your fingers and hoping that it's going to turn out and sometimes it doesn't and you have to go back to the drawing board and go, well, what's the problem here? Is it lack of eyeballs or is it a lack of conversion or is there something else?

Sonya:
Oh, absolutely and I mean, I know for us, sometimes we'll pick up a client in a particular industry and we'll have a non-compete for that city for them. So say for example, it's a painter that we're working with in Melbourne and we're getting incredible results for them. Amazing leads they're booked out all of that. We can then take the exact same campaign and work with the painter in Sydney and this has happened in industries before and it's crickets. It just does not work the same.

Sonya:
So it's definitely ... I mean, you've got all that data behind you. You've got proof of concept, but sometimes just the change in one element, whether it's the different market or can mean that it doesn't necessarily work. So you're right, there needs to be that element of faith and also I think the determination to ascertain what's not working and pivot and...

Brooke McCarthy:
Absolutely there's a huge amount of resilience involved, not just in self-employment, but in marketing as well you need to have some grit to try something new, to keep trying, to keep experimenting, to keep tweaking, to keep editing, to keep launching and relaunching and this is not something that everybody is born with.

Brooke McCarthy:
It's not something that everybody cultivates. I think it can definitely be cultivated, but for a lot of people, it's just missing an action and it will be reflected, I believe in your business's bottom line and if there was one characteristic or attribute that I think has been pivotal to my business over the last 10 years, it's pigheadedness.

Sonya:
I love that. Yes, can relate. Yeah. I completely agree with you and look, I say often that I think it's my competitiveness in business and life in general. I often view everything as a competition against myself and how can you keep improving and alright that didn't work, we don't give up and look, I think it can be applied to so many different areas of business at the end of the day it all comes down to working out what's going to work for you and your target audience and making sure you're delivering that to them. So you keep growing.

Brooke McCarthy:
Oh yeah, absolutely and finding also that sweet spot between what the market wants or what your ideal clients want, what you're good at and perhaps also what you love and I think probably possibly for people like you and I Sonya, that what you love, peace comes last. It's what the market wants and what we're good at and we might go [inaudible 00:23:02] hell for leather into that direction and then at least for me because I can't speak for you, but at least for me I get to a point and I think, oh, I'm doing all this stuff and it's actually pretty straightforward and easy and people are lining up to painting, but I don't actually like it anymore. I'm bored, I'm done, I'm finished with this thing. So yeah, that's interesting too,

Sonya:
Brooke, let's talk about your business and your services for a minute. What is it that you help business owners with? So you're a digital strategist, you do coaching, you do consulting, I've seen you've worked with some incredible brands doing some training as well.

Brooke McCarthy:
Yeah, so I've worked with big brands, such as Australia Post who had me come in and talk to their customers who are small business owners and I've been paid by Daikin Air Conditioning. They flew me around Australia to speak to their clients who were all small business owners and give them skills in digital marketing.

Brooke McCarthy:
But 95% of my businesses ... of my clients, sorry, are small business owners and sole traders and they're people who would way rather just do the work than talk about it. So they're not people who derived much joy in marketing. That they do it as a necessity rather than a pleasure and they are oftentimes very, very self-conscious, whether they're the face of the business or whether they're not the face of the business, they oftentimes quite self-conscious to the point of really ... I guess you just speak to that earlier concept of self-sabotage they're sabotaging the opportunities that are in front of them and they're often the town's best kept secret.

Brooke McCarthy:
Because I have some exceptionally overqualified clients, there's one or two people that jumped [to my butt 00:24:59]. In one scenario, the client had a PhD and I really applied some pressure to get her, to start referring to herself as doctor, she had so much experience, decades of experience, so many qualifications and she was hiding a lot under the bushel as they say, because for multiple reasons including that weird tall poppy syndrome we have in Australia and the way that we need to use the humble brag. It's not straightforward to just speak well of yourself in Australia, it's a very complicated thing. So, that can really work against you sometimes and especially if you're a woman, especially if you don't have the nuances of the humble brag down path.

Sonya:
No, I was about to say, especially if you're a woman. You took the words out of my mouth, then I think that's the thing, I don't know I think maybe you should host a workshop on this Brook, but I would love a workshop on how to talk about your achievements.

Brooke McCarthy:
Yeah, absolutely and it's definitely a practice I think of the amount of ... and I'm there too. I specialize in this because I understand it intimately. It has taken me years to be able to talk well of myself and to talk well with myself in front of people that I don't know well. It's a process and we are actively socialized in the opposite direction as women in Australia. So a lot of self-employment is dismantling our socialization and going, is this useful? Is this helpful? Does this give me the outcome that I want? No, it doesn't okay. Well, I'm going to discard it.

Brooke McCarthy:
And like I was saying earlier this is often a complicated process, it's a protracted process, it takes a hell of a lot of discernment and a hell of a lot of self-compassion as well, because it can be incredibly sad and angering and all of the emotions when you go, wow, all these years I've been actively working against my best interests and haven't realized that.

Sonya:
Yep. All right, Brooke, I'm going to be contacting you in a few months being, right where's the workshop [inaudible 00:27:29]. Brooke if someone wants to find out more about you or engage your services, where can they do that?

Brooke McCarthy:
So I have two websites. My main website is hustleandheart.com.au that's where I sell the majority of my courses and programs. I have a membership as well over at hustleandheart.com.au and then my other website is brookemccarthy.com. There's no Ian Brook. You can find me on pretty much all the major social media channels. Just don't go looking for me on TikTok because that's embarrassing.

Sonya:
And you've got TikTok?

Brooke McCarthy:
It's full of videos of my children, but yes, I have taught TikTok at Swinburne University-

Sonya:
Oh wow.

Brooke McCarthy:
... [inaudible 00:28:19] year olds and that made me feel incredibly old at the ripe old age of 41. My 11 year old daughter is helping me bring me up to speed.

Sonya:
Very good. It's such an addictive platform now.

Brooke McCarthy:
Yeah. I tell you what I am sitting there looking at it because I love to dance. I love dancing. You invite me to a party I'll get the dance floor started. I'll be up on the bar, I'll be pulling everybody in. I absolutely love it but so I'm really, really wrestling with myself going, Brooke is this the impression that you want to give under your professional business profile and it's not a straightforward question. So I'm still grappling with that I'll let you know.

Sonya:
Oh, fair enough. We won't link to your TikTok, but I will link to everything else if people want to find you. Brooke thanks so much for coming on the show and having a chat. I really appreciate it.

Brooke McCarthy:
Thank you, Sonya. It's been fun.